Given Andrew Litten’s burgeoning success both at home and abroad over the last twelve months, it’s perhaps surprising that he is even more excited about this exhibition. But this is, for him, an altogether edgier collection of work centred not around the Lofty, the Significant, the High-minded – but around the ordinary: Little things, caught moments, half-forgotten or suppressed memories or intimacies that are as individual to each of us as if they had our very DNA, yet striking and altogether wider and more reverberative note at the same time.
Appropriately, therefore, this is almost exclusively figurative work: ordinary people, ordinary bodies, ordinary things that haul us back from where we think we’ve moved onto; our own completely personal stuff that-perhaps to our surprise-we find we share with everybody else. And, very much in line with this the work itself and its techniques is as unyielding to easy categorising: for every seemingly appropriate adjective-whimsical, spontaneous, artless, witty, there is a counter balancing word which seems equally appropriate-subtle, instinctively #crafted, deceptively straightforward, resonant. W.H Auden famously described poetry as a “marvellously serious joke”, and the phrase seems just as appropriate to catch the ambiguity in Litten’s work too.
Even the textures are almost a metaphor for what’s going on-seemingly thinnish basic colours which at times barely seem to cover the scruffy bit of board, and yet worked on, teased, scratched into, left bare at times, to provide what is obviously a thoughtful counterpoint to what might be going on in the picture. All the old painters’ remarks about how difficult it is to re-learn to paint with the directness and simplicity of a child, and yet with an adult’s overlaid or underlying emotional complexity, come rushing back when looking at, and appreciating, Andrew’s work. It is both very clever, and very taxing, to make it seem as simple as he sometimes does and yet at the same time to suggest that more may be going on than meets the immediate gaze. Truly it’s not that he’s self-taught, as that he could only be self-taught!
Success has come quickly once the work started to get seen, and initially that was probably more of a reflection of the quirky accessibility of his work, colonising as it did that small patch of ground between (but never including) designer angst and the obsessively self-absorbed. In the earlier painting the horses were gallivanting and occasionally five-legged; neither they nor the ubiquitous nude muse with her slow stare show any sense of what John Webster calls “up yonder”. They are to be celebrated and enjoyed for themselves, not for any sense of transience, wing’d chariots, days of wine and roses, or Hardy’s ephemeral figures caught grouped around a piano. A slightly more overt depth and resonance seems to haunt the later work; it seems to acknowledge an awareness of the skull beneath the skin, the widows on the park bench, the fox’s coup with the chickens.
In any case, innovation and subversion often come through stealth, humour, disguise. T.S.Eliot described himself as a bank clerk and dressed to suit, likewise Magritte. Litten’s art may favour the thin scalpel or the tickling stick-and sometimes both-but never the cudgel. About all, though and cutting through any art crit psychobabble there is a factor of charm and delight. At times you may wince, or even grimace or suck in your breath, but above all you gotta laugh, “We must have circuses, squire” lisps that embodiment of Littenism, Mr. Sleary, to the utilitarian Grandgrind, “Roll with it”, as a pop musician chortled more trenchantly. So much so called naïve art smells of contrivance and artifice. Punch and Judy impact, and the Capacity for the audience to immerse and lose themselves in it, is undermined, destroyed even, by the sight, the awareness, of the puppeteers wrists below the costume. And of course the trick is in the concealing of this rather than the denial-when Richey Edwards of the Manics carved ‘4 Real’ into his arm with a razorblade on being asked if they were faking there angst, he missed the point. The truest poetry is the best feigning; in bed, all we want is a competent poseur. That Andrew Litten uses the naïve to show his increasingly complex take on the world is an irony not lost on any one, especially him.
Delightfully too, the last year’s leaping successes have created an even greater wish, need, freedom to experiment, rather than creating pressure. Some of the current work might almost be subtitled ‘Litten at play’ as dolls, ladders, plastic icons, bubblegum and fake plastic trees make there appearance. Whatever next! Rather than repeat himself, which is not unknown in the art world, Andrew has chosen to use the liberating effect of having (a bit more) money and recognition, to push himself, his boundaries, subjects and techniques considerably further, while still retaining the essence of what made people want his work in the first place.
Paul Vibert
This website and images contained within it are copyright Andrew Litten 2009 - 2011